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This paper is an attempt to explore the two prominent populist moments in post- colonial India, namely Indira Gandhi's and Narendra Modi's politics, to understand the formation, transformation, and repercussions of populism at different historical conjunctures. To move beyond the existing accounts that have either tended to reduce populism to a rhetoric style or a campaign strategy or failed to address the dynamic relationship between populism and nationalism, the paper draws on the discursive- theoretical approach developed by Ernesto Laclau and scholars influenced by him, which sees populism as a political logic, with a specific focus on the distinction and articulation between populism and nationalism. Through a nuanced analysis of Gandhi's and Modi's populist politics, the paper hopes to shed light on the entanglement between populism and nationalism, or between "the people" and "the nation" in different forms that has continued to characterize the political landscape of India until today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will examine state intervention in the lives of tigers and people living in and around Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh, Central India. It explores how, over a decade after a reintroduction project rebuilt the tiger population from extinction and the central government launched a new compensation scheme to relocate villagers away from the national park, relocated tigers and not-yet relocated villagers resist and challenge conservation interventions to eradicate human life in Panna Tiger Reserve and (re)construct it as a wild tiger landscape. It will show how discourses of conservation and development that motivate state intervention seek to depoliticize and obfuscate programmes of control over human and tiger lives through their separation and purported 'care', contiguous with colonial policies and discursive practices that have intertwined the fate of wild animals and forest-dependent villagers in this part of India. In their feral subversions against these interventions, relocated tigers and not-yet relocated villagers expose the problematic contradictions and tensions that plague animal management, wildlife conservation, and rural development in India today. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the article draws on case studies and accounts from communities living around Panna Tiger Reserve to present alternatives to colonial and post-colonial discursive legitimizations of state intervention and control, revealing alternate understandings of the entanglement of humans and animals and the categories of 'wild' and 'tame'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India has over the years earned the reputation of being the first country in the world to impart sex education. However, in the present time when the whole world is gradually becoming aware of and open towards the idea of alternate sexuality, in India, still people with discursive sexualities are treated with contempt and derogatory comments. This paper analyzes the condition of alternate sexuality in pre-colonial India and elucidates how the Victorian notion of culture and civilization has hampered the growth of discursive identities in India. With reference to Mahesh Dattani's famous play On a Muggy Night in Mumbai, it delves deep into the historicity and dynamics of gay personalities in India and outlines the different camouflaging techniques adopted by them in order to conspicuously mingle with the largely heterosexual Indian population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Islamophobia in India, with the coming to power of BJP, a Hindutva (Indian nationalist) party, is on the increase. To understand Islamophobia in India, the approach in this article diverts from studies that focus on empirical data of incidence and discriminatory legislation to the construct of the figure of the Muslim as the Other. My approach focuses on Hindutvaism and the British Orientalist construction of the 18th-century figure of Tipu Sultan as a signifier in the marking of Muslims as the Other. British Orientalists during colonialism and Hindutvaism in post-colonial India both construct Tipu as the figure of the Muslim. This brings the Orientalist discursive practice, which constructed the figure of Muslim as an obstruction to imperial British national imagination, in dialogue with the Hindutva Islamophobic narrative. To show that the Hindutva construction of the figure of Muslim has echoes of Orientalism, I adopt a decolonial approach of "coloniality," as a continuation of Westerncentric global political dominance, and "colonial situation," as the perpetuation of discrimination against a marked identity in postcolonial nations. Contrasting the construction of Tipu in Orientalism and Hindutvaism situates Islamophobia as a repertoire of problematizing the figure of the Muslim in Orientalism. The approach challenges the view that the colonialist discursive practice that marked Muslims as Other is the preserve of Orientalism, highlighting the influence of Orientalism, as a way of thinking, in post-colonial nations and the unfinished business of decolonisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 2019, the Indian parliament implemented the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that gives non-Muslim immigrants from the neighboring countries an easy access to Indian citizenship. Across India, the CAA has garnered support and provoked protests in equal measure. This paper examines how #SupportCAA constantly negotiates between two parallel objectives: first, to achieve a pan-national unification of non-Muslim "Indians" (practically, Hindus); and second, to reconfigure India as a site for the pan-Hindutva communion against the Muslim Other. It seeks to understand: How does #SupportCAA as a platform furnish pan-Hindutva discourses, while rendering agency to an "imagined community" of pan-national CAA supporters? How do the CAA ideologues function as "networked publics," and then go on to territorialize certain online spaces/fora? What does the CAA bequeath to the "imagined community" in question? What vocabulary of political partisanship does such territorialization furnish? How does it draw on the discourses of religious nationalism and remain nearly impervious to any dissent? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 2019, the Indian parliament implemented the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that gives non-Muslim immigrants from the neighboring countries an easy access to Indian citizenship. Across India, the CAA has garnered support and provoked protests in equal measure. This paper examines how #SupportCAA constantly negotiates between two parallel objectives: first, to achieve a pan-national unification of non-Muslim "Indians" (practically, Hindus); and second, to reconfigure India as a site for the pan-Hindutva communion against the Muslim Other. It seeks to understand: How does #SupportCAA as a platform furnish pan-Hindutva discourses, while rendering agency to an "imagined community" of pan-national CAA supporters? How do the CAA ideologues function as "networked publics," and then go on to territorialize certain online spaces/fora? What does the CAA bequeath to the "imagined community" in question? What vocabulary of political partisanship does such territorialization furnish? How does it draw on the discourses of religious nationalism and remain nearly impervious to any dissent? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the discursive strategies employed by Dalits and other marginalized groups to highlight inspirational stories of bottom-up change across rural India. These agential narratives are featured in the community-run alternative digital media portal, Video Volunteer's series, "Videos that Created Change." I contend that marginalized groups' articulation of structural change against systemic oppression takes the form of vernacular discursive practices, which foreground place-based identities and regional languages. Such newly emerging digital media practices have the potential to disrupt the hegemonic mainstream template of marginalized citizens' abject victimhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I aim to explore in what ways a digital identity system affects the relationship between state and citizen. Invoking 'seeing the state' as an analytical lens and adopting 'anthropology of state' as a methodological approach, I explore the changing state–citizen relationship through citizens' everyday encounters with the state and through quotidian practices of the state mediated through material and social practices around Aadhaar, the foundational digital ID system in India. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on welfare disbursement in Jharkhand, I argue, when citizens interact with the state through the workings of Aadhaar, they see the state to be increasingly distant, opaque and seamful. My overall objective is to show how the discursive practices through which the state appear in its citizens' perception changes through the mediation of a foundational digital identity system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Text is the confluence of multiple social relations that take place in the context of available resources and constitute the identity of the participants under sociocultural rules. In Native American context, the available resources have been distributed and adjusted in the favor of the whites. To counter this hegemonic arrangement, Sherman Alexie's fiction imaginatively develops the situations in which the relationships of the Native Americans among themselves and with the Whites are readjusted through redistribution of social resources. Native American presence in the whitewashed contemporaneity of America forms intercontextuality seeking re-placement and re-situatedness of the Native subject in the active flow of the social life of today's multi-ethnic, multi-cultural US society. The school serves as a structure where academic practices are conducted according to Euroamerican norms of signification, and resources of allocation and authorization. This article explores how Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian shows the Native American subject performing prescribed socio-cultural functions in interaction with the whites in the academic environment of two schools, first at the Reservation school and then at the white school in Reardan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intangible heritage and architecture, articulate specific cultural processes and history. In Vassanji's non-fictional narrative A Place Within: Rediscovering India, there is place-making through the lens of culture, religion, history, politics and migration. Positioning himself as a tourist to his ancestral homeland, the author makes observations that can be critiqued through the concept of 'palimpsest' – an intriguing 'layering' that gesture at wider circuits of culture. This study is an examination of the diasporic consciousness, religious encounters; heritage narrative features, the tracing of overlapping cultural spheres in Delhi, aesthetic and political tensions, as represented in Vassanji's narrative. The article is an exploration of a broad system of cultural and religious discursive constructions and practices in architecture, as suggested in the non-fictional narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the forested landscapes of central India, elite anxieties around extinction threats to charismatic carnivores has brought about a deeply exclusionary conservationist turn in state territoriality. This article draws a conceptual distinction between territoriality for extraction (TE) and territoriality for conservation (TC) in forested landscapes, since they have different implications for space, nature and society. Through a case study from the Kuno forests of central India, it examines the impact of the shift from TE to TC on indigenous ways of knowing and using the forest. It shows that the Sahariya Adivasi community had evolved a dynamic, site-specific and resilient indigenous system of tree tenure (ITTS) to use and manage the Boswellia serrata (Salai) forest, from which they harvested chir gum for sale. Based on participatory mapping and in-depth interviews, it contends that the ontology of property-as-relations rather than as property-as-possession is more productive for theorizing indigenous use and access of valuable tree species in forest landscapes of the global South. The ITTS is defined in terms of tree tenure, property-as-relations, and indigenous claim-making over resources, and is borne out of people's everyday use, harvest and labour practices around specific plant species. It shows how the ITTS, which withstood more than a century of colonial and postcolonial impulses of TE, is crumbling under the onslaught of a more pernicious form of TC driven by the material and discursive practices associated with cheetah conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indian cities seem particularly prone to investigation through narrative both for the abundance of material about the origins and the development of urban centres from ancient to medieval times--which often contrasts with the relative scarceness of purely 'historical' data--and for the tendency to elaborate modern and contemporary "a posteriori narrative- myths" (Aravot 1995) through popular media such as cinema and television. Using methodological tools provided by research on narratives and analysing two case studies with reference to the cities of Ayodhyā and Bengaluru, the present paper investigates the processes and the dynamics by which narrations on cities are made to evolve. It builds on the conceptual frame provided by recent narratological scholarship, with a specific reference to the "increasing recognition of the ubiquity of narrative within any culture, in discursive practices as diverse as theology, historiography, economics, legal practice, political speech-making, everyday conversation and philosophy" (Rigney 1992: 263-264, italics in the original). Focusing on the 'constructive' aspect of narrative, seen as a discourse that intrinsically involves the active (and determinant) participation of the narrator, it argues that this perspective of analysis allows the researcher to interpret urban narratives eminently in political terms, or within relations of power--which also legitimizes the use of narrative materials for historical research. In broader terms, it contends that narration can give back structured information about the values and the practices which characterize a given society, and which are selectively communicated by the narrator(s); and that, in turn, this quality of 'restoring' structured information may shed more light on the inherent nature of narration itself and lead to further theorization both on its creative dynamics and its created artefacts. Practice of exploration of narration in a context of open communication with other disciplines may undoubtedly facilitate this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the theory of articulation to analyze the debate surrounding the decision by the Government of India to open up the Indian print media to foreign investment. The decision was preceded and followed by intense wrangling within the pages of the very newspapers that were to be affected by it, thus resulting in a contentious debate around the move. Using the theory of articulation to explore the mechanism of discursive power exercised by each side within the debate the paper argues that each side articulated the same four themes with culturally specific meanings to shape the government’s decision in their favor. This exploration seeks to emphasize the discursive dimension of globalization as a key site where power struggles are played out and consensus about policy choices is created. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is an attempt to analyse the emerging relationship between the political Left and new social movements and NGOs in the contemporary time. The relationship between Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishad and CPI (M) isa case in point. The example shows that the cooperation between the political left and NGOs changes the policies of the former, which makes it more capable for fruitful intervention in civil society based on a 'discursive strategy' Historical explanation of the relationship between the Left and Parishad proves that both have been benefited from this. It is widely acknowledged that the KSSP has been recognized by the CPM as a stake holder in the implementation of public policies since the Total Literacy Campaign in the late 1980s. However, the cooperation invited criticism from the orthodox Marxists and the political opponents of CPI M) recently. The sensitive debate on the cooperation between the two organisations in the People's Plan Campaign, a programme for decentralised development and planning at the local level during the Left Democratic Front in 1997-2001 became an issue in the group-war within the party recently. The debate gives reflections on the challenges and prospects of the political left to establish tie-up with civil society organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with a description of the Bhopal disaster, when a leak at the Union Carbide company killed thousands, this essay turns to the issue of the politics of discursive practices. The discussion focuses at first on a genealogy of environmental discourses— ranging from conservation to sustainability and then proceeds to a treatment of the way various dimensions of political economy constitute events of ethnic exclusion. The essay ends with a juxtaposition of traditional ethics and a politics of aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]